Friday, 20 December 2013

Stealing Dan.

What is the matter with me? Anyone would think I was ill. OK,
I may be a little ill. Things may be going a bit wrong, battles being lost. Low
morale, but hedges?

Who cares
about hedges? Do I actually want to spend
these last few months with hedge folk?

And I’ve got a cold. And no Christmas this year.

But

However bad it gets I should still be OK in January and that
means I have a chance to break a golden rule that has guided me throughout my life
– ‘No tribute bands’.

I could never understand why anyone would want to see a band
pretending to be The Beatles or ABBA or whoever. I mean, wigs?

For real?

I’ve been building up to it over the last few months.

I’m planning to drive to Watford (it’s a
million miles away) to see ‘Stanley Dee’ on the fifth of January. That’s a ten
piece band in tribute to 'Steely Dan'.

Think about it – a ten piece, with three or more vocalists, a brass
section – the whole lot.

The sheer outrageousness of this idea just drew me. Imagine
the conceit of it; no ten piece is ever going to pay its way, just think of the
petrol.

In any case I’m the only person I ever met who loved Steely
Dan, then or now.

Steely Dan are a mixture of 70’s rock, cool jazz and deeply
subversive lyrics hidden behind smoothly deceptive sounds. They were always a
studio band, hiring a shifting army of session musicians and stealing tasty
riffs from the modern jazz greats. They didn’t tour after their very early years
and only began to tour again in the 2000’s. Their problem was that their sound
was just too complicated to take out on the road.

And you want to do a tribute to the band that couldn't even get its act together to tour itself? What a project?! How could that ever work? Who would listen to
it apart from me?